Political subjectivity in Edmund Burke’s India and liberal multiculturalism

Edmund
Burke’s speeches on India illustrate the emergence of the orientalised
political subject. Traces of this in the present can be seen through the
relationship between British multiculturalism and the undocumented migrant.

In
the late eighteenth century a strand of conservative thought argued that one’s enjoyment
of ‘rights’ was predicated upon cultural distinction and a venerated history.
Edmund Burke’s famous critique of Indian affairs was made possible by a new way
of perceiving colonial subjects as endowed with culture and history, and therefore
certain ‘rights’. Orientalism became the means of constructing this political subject.
In what follows, I argue that British multiculturalist politics contains traces
of this orientalised political subject in its concept of national citizenship.

Throughout Burke’s political career, British
presence in India was synonymous with the accumulation of capital by a
quasi-private enterprise: the East India Company. Having wrested the eastern
trade monopoly from the Portuguese by the 1640s, the company’s commercial and
political ventures in India began to intensify. By the latter half of the
eighteenth century the company took on an overtly imperialist character, embarking
on missions to ‘wage war, make peace, raise taxes, and administer justice’,
with rents paid to the monarch and public returns ‘for the benefit of the
British nation’. It is in response to the actions of Governor-General Warren
Hastings that a campaign was launched to discover what principles and practices
could be applied to justly govern this emergent colonial population. The
writings and speeches of Edmund Burke spearheaded this late eighteenth century
search for colonial reform.

Burke, previously a supporter of the Company’s
autonomy and its chartered rights, sought to critique the administration of
India and the Company on the grounds of exploitation, corruption, illegitimacy
of rule and damage to social and cultural stability. His proposals for colonial
reform were made possible by his mastery of contemporary orientalist discourse
on Indian affairs. Despite the ending of his friendship with the esteemed orientalist,
William Jones, when Burke suspected him of lending support to Warren Hastings
during his impeachment, his influence on Burke is undeniable. In a letter to
the first Marquis of Cornwallis, Jones stated that ‘if we had a complete Digest
of Hindu and Mohammedan laws … we should rarely be at a loss for principles at
least and rules applicable to the cases before us’. Burke’s
‘patronizing/patronized orientalism’ reflected Jones’s ambition of justifying
new foundations for rule and legitimacy to differentiate colonial subjects.

Burke speaks of Indians as ‘civilized’
and ‘cultivated’, in comparison to what he saw as the origins of Europe. This
sentiment led him to state that Indians should be governed ‘upon their own
principles and maxims and not upon ours, that we must not think to force them
to our narrow ideas, but extend ours to take in theirs.’ He justified this through
cultural difference. Burke claimed, for example, that Indians were unable to
cross the ocean without losing their caste and were prohibited by custom from
sharing a meal with foreigners. It is from this sympathy with the other that
his pioneering critique of the East India Company aimed to rally parliament
against ‘civilizational hierarchies … by which British power justified its
territorial expansionism and commercial avarice’. Burke ultimately sought to
reform the Company’s affairs ‘in the name of those [who] suffered from its
moral and political exclusions’ since he saw the other as enfeebled by colonialism and cowering in the light of
the British state. For Burke, Indians constituted a political community.

Of course Burke’s attempt to recover and
protect the imagined ‘rights’ of Indians can be viewed as pre-empting the colonial
invention of tradition to legitimate imperial authority amongst the Indian populace:
a logic which shapes culture as a ‘means and end of colonial conquest’. After
all, knowing the Indian through history and culture did not lead Burke to
reject colonial rule during the impeachment of Hastings. Burke only intended
that local traditions should not be swept aside by the forces of colonialism. Once
we contrast this configuration of ‘difference management’, with practices
reserved for those deemed to fall outside orientalist knowledge, namely black
slaves, we start to reveal the full functionality of this orientalised
political subject.

Why were black slaves not conceptualised
in the same orientalising terms Burke showed for Indians? Burke’s early
justification of slavery appears to contradict his famous critique of
geographical morality: ‘the slaves we buy were in the same condition in
Africa’. This was the case since blacks were not an object of orientalist
sympathy. They were seen as having no distinctive history apart from slavery.
Burke could not deploy history to legitimate rights in this presumed
all-determining situation of an unchanging violence. Since there was no
threatened or forgotten tradition to be recognized and sympathised with, blacks
could not be seen as bearers of rights which could be infringed by colonialism.

To say black slaves, as the sub-humans of
eighteenth century thought, have no history apart from slavery, is also to make
a subtle claim that they have no history without Europeans. It can be argued
convincingly that European and African history is embedded within a unified
historical process of capital expansion. However, Burke is not pointing to the
intractability of ‘their’ and ‘our’ histories through the world system. Instead
it is this absence of history deemed to be outside ‘the West’ that has a
profound impact upon how black slaves are imagined, in a state of pure
passivity.

When we turn to Burke’s gradualist
abolitionism, in A Sketch of the Negro
Code,there is no recourse to local
tradition as a means for justifying why the institution of slavery should be
reformed. Instead his proposed regulations were a means to civilise. Similarly,
when he ponders emancipation in his Speech
on Conciliation with America, he considers that it will come at the hands
of the master. Although Burke notes that slaves may be suspicious of abolition
from ‘that very nation which has sold them to their present masters’, he
nevertheless makes no suggestion (if we were to follow his logic) that
emancipation coalesces with African traditions.

Burke was able to distinguish Indians
from black slaves by shrouding the foundational violence of British presence in
India with a ‘sacred veil’. This serves to legitimate the ‘uncovering’ of
Indian’s ‘authentic’ forgotten past to find a basis for political legitimacy,
functional for both a benevolent colonialism and the ‘recognition’ of Indian
political subjectivity. The fabricated distance from the ‘true’ mythical India enabled
Burke to separate contemporary Indian practices, which he admitted might have offended
British law, from principles during the impeachment trial. The application of
orientalist knowledge led to the ‘uncovering’ and essentialisation of native
laws and institutions supposedly on the cusp of being derided and forgotten
through colonialism. Burke was led to ‘respect’ the ‘great force’ and
‘stability’ of Muslim institutions, claiming that their vast historical
permanence placed their laws outside of British judgement.

When
faced with Hastings’ ‘geographical morality’, which posited that bribery and
exploitation were in accordance with local despotic custom, Burke is commonly
said to have drawn upon universalising arguments derived from natural law.
However it is Burke’s orientalist veneration of an imagined India that led him
to critique Hastings’ portrayal of oriental despotism. Burke stated ‘Oriental
governments know nothing of this arbitrary power’. He argued ‘their morality is equal to ours’. If
this separation between us and them did not impinge upon a differential
valuation of morality, it was precisely because of Burke’s reverence for imagining
tradition as historically and culturally situated grounds for debating justice.

Portrait of East India Company Official by Dip Chand (1760-1764). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Burke
saw that political power in India could only be legitimated through a state’s
duty to uphold the customary and property rights of its subjects (against
Company abuse), which was also the condition through which natural law could be
known and respected. Orientalism plays a crucial part in enabling this
position. Yet Burke’s orientalism diversifies the model of what it means to be
a political subject beyond that of the abstract ahistorical citizen.

This
fuelled the disagreement between Burke and Hastings, leading to a situation
whereby Burke’s notion of oriental tradition as neither despotic nor entirely beyond
the West’s judgement, had a subversive impact on ‘political orientalism’, which
held that the only way of expressing the political is through an abstract judging
Western political subject defined in contrast to the despotic oriental. This
position matures as he concludes the first day of the impeachment of Hastings: ‘I impeach him in the name of all the Commons…whose name he
has dishonoured… I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws,
rights and liberties he has subverted … I impeach him in the name of human
nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured and oppressed’.

By turning to this less acknowledged and
largely unrealised strand of early colonial ‘difference management’, we can see
how Burke’s version of orientalism (eroticizing the other can lead to the
‘recognition’ of different political traditions) reconfigures and subverts the
thematic of ‘political orientalism’ (there is only one form and body through
which politics can be recognized in opposition to an inferior East). Burke exemplifies
a branch of (anti)colonial and anti-Jacobin thought which imagined political
subjectivity as visualized through and enacted by virtue of historical
precedent. Not any history or people could be recognized to exhibit political
subjectivity, only those who could be culturalised and historicised.
Orientalist knowledge provided the means of rendering the Indian intelligible
on these politicising terms, while emplacing the slave beyond the pale of
discrete historical traditions.

In contrast to the abstract western
citizen defined against non-western others, this manner of knowing the subject allows
Burke to maintain his conception of the British constitution as a benchmark for
the political, valuing Indians because of their supposed equality ‘in law, culture
and political institutions’, while also refraining from ascribing them any
claim to sovereignty. The complex and ambivalent orientalised political
subject, as a product of early colonial ‘difference management’, was a figure
founded for both domination and liberation, at once on terms acquiescent to western
valuations of the political subject and beyond such valuations.

Multiculturalism and the undocumented migrant

Times
have changed. The configuration of ‘difference management’ has shifted from how
to live as and with colonial subjects to how to live as and with minoritized
citizens. This is no longer a set of practises sustaining a moral justification
for empire and the preservation of tradition. Through multiculturalism, its
modern day task is the maintenance of a cohesive national state capable of ‘recognizing’
multiple identities.

Turning
to the birth of the orientalised political subject has shown us how a coupling
of tradition and orientalism split those who could be ‘recognized’ as
exhibiting non-western forms of political subjectivity from those who were
deemed without tradition. Two figures emerged from this: the culturalised
Indian and the naturalised black slave. Clearly these subjects have mutated
over centuries of colonial government, and now come to reside in the margins of
national history. Traces of this colonial
hierarchy, and how this differentiation was utilised to subvert political
orientalism, can however still be found through the ways in which liberal-pluralist
British multiculturalism administers its own ‘difference management’ of the
minoritized citizen and the undocumented migrant.

Once
we shift to multiculturalist ‘difference management’, essentialism, culturalism
and hierarchies of culture as means of determining one’s rights are resolutely
rejected. Instead we have the site of multicultural struggle, collective
tradition and active conceptions of citizenship. Although multiculturalism
steers clear of undermining the ever-inclusive figure of the liberal citizen,
it diversifies what it means to be political. Attempts at recognition such as
‘Muslim assertiveness’, religiously conceived political enactments or
differentiated legal positions as an expression of citizenship, introduce a
fleeting difference into the western ideal of what constitutes expressions of political
subjectivity. It questions the premise that there is only one model and path of
political subjectivity through the master signifier of the liberal citizen
defined against an orientalised other. British multiculturalism achieves this
by culturalising politics, at the same time as it creates a new figure devoid
of culture and tradition: the undocumented migrant.

In the Parekh Reportjustice is a matter of extending human rights, not
one of culturalising the undocumented so as to recognize equal status. The Parekh Reportwarned that
multiculturalism cannot be secured by ‘tough immigration policies’. It condemns
the racialisation of immigration and puts forward various recommendations to overcome
negative stereotypes and monitor treatment in reference to the 1998 Human
Rights Act and EU policy.

Seeking to extend the civil and social
rights for those who are deemed undeserving by virtue of where they originate
from and their status of mobility, at the expense of culturalising migration
(the problem in the first place), is a welcome move. Yet as we have seen,
multiculturalism subverts ‘political orientalism’ not by directly challenging
nationally conceived rights, but by undermining its homogeneity.
Multiculturalism diversifies enactments of citizenship through the subject of
the minoritized citizen. However the challenges multiculturalism poses to the
unified singular political subject can only emerge at the expense of the
non-citizen. The potential of the minoritized citizen is dependent upon being a
bearer, if not a champion, of liberal rights. This is realised against the
backdrop of those who cannot formally belong to the national community. The
paradox in Burke’s culturalisation of the other as a means of simultaneously maintaining
and subverting domination is cast anew in the form of a differentiated
culturalised citizen whose subversion of ‘political orientalism’ can only be
attempted if occupying the position of a nationally
esteemed rights-bearing other, in contradistinction to the undocumented.

Michel
Foucault reminds us that discourse is not simply ‘divided between the dominant
discourse and the dominated one; but [exists] as a multiplicity of discursive
elements that can come into play in various strategies’. By pointing to the
emergence of the orientalised political subject, we have seen how this subject
was conceived as both manageable for colonial rule and devised to question a
homogenous western ideal for conceiving of political subjectivity. The other to this orientalised political
subject was not simply the self-determining Briton, but the slave that was imagined
without tradition. Once we shift to the minoritized citizen, this contemporary
figure is envisioned through multiculturalist state practice to simultaneously
constitute and mollify issues of cohesion, illiberal extremism and so on. Yet
this figure also threatens western conceptions of political subjectivity by
bringing culture and religion to the fore of the political; the last bastion
which allowed the west to politically define itself against others.
Nonetheless, this contemporary subversion of ‘political orientalism’ has also
reconstituted its own other: the undocumented migrant.

Today,
disillusionment is rife concerning multiculturalism’s potential for both
anti-racism and securitization. Could this be an opportunity to make the mapping
of the traces of the orientalised political subject into a critical enterprise,
finally moving us beyond the contradictory legacies of colonial domination?

This article is an edited extract of ‘Subverting orientalism: political subjectivity in Edmund Burke’s India and liberal multiculturalism’ which appeared in the Citizenship Studies 2012 special issue ‘Citizenship after orientalism: an unfinished project’. The referenced and complete essay can be found here. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 249379.

This article forms part of an editorial partnership, funded by the Oecumene Project and the Open University, launched in November 2012.

About the author

Zaki Nahaboo is a PhD
student in Politics and International Studies at The Open University. His research
aims to trace the historical innovations which have made multiculturalism both
a problem and solution to questions of what it means, and what it can mean, to
be political in contemporary Britain.

What images of citizenship are emerging in relation to the processes of decolonization and deorientalization? Keynote speakers Saba Mahmood and Walter Mignolo together with a selection of panellists will address this question from multi-disciplinary perspectives.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 licence.
If you have any queries about republishing please contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.